Senate Bill 1045: Necessary Intervention or an Overreach?

There’s a new category of conservatorship that the Mayor would like to bring to San Francisco. It is allowed by Senate Bill 1045, which has been signed by the Governor. This new form of conservatorship is welcomed by some, objected to by others, and will be accepted or rejected by our Board of Supervisors in the near future.

What is a conservatorship? It involves an involuntary move to a setting where an evaluation takes place by a professional, followed by an investigation by another professional, and finally a hearing before a judge. If someone is conserved, his or her right to choose where one lives, decisions about health care, and how the individual’s income is used, are removed from that individual and turned over to the conservator. The ACLU refers to this category and loss of rights as “The biggest deprivation of civil rights aside from the death penalty.”

This type of conservatorship is called an LPS conservatorship, named after the legislators (Lanterman, Petris, and Short) who introduced that law many years back. These types of conservatorship are carefully overseen, and used only when a person cannot provide food, clothing, and shelter for themselves.

The language in this new legislation as it was introduced referred to conservatorships for homeless individuals. That designation was deemed too inflammatory, and now it covers those who have been detained pursuant to Welfare and Institutions Code section 5150 eight or more times in a year. We have all probably seen individuals on the streets of San Francisco who appeared to need adult supervision and support. No question. But how to best remedy their plight?

Questions Remain

Some of the questions that remain to be answered:

1) Who decides? If the police pick up a person eight times, is that in itself a qualifier for loss of rights?

2) Since there are no state funds that come in with the bill, how will the required services and housing be paid for? And if those funds are available now, why are they not being used to expand and enhance services and housing today?

Do we really want this law to be implemented in San Francisco, saying it’s not targeting the homeless, but we all know it is?

Shira Noel, HANC Board Member, and Policy and Advocacy Coordinator for the Homeless Youth Alliance, will provide her perspective on this measure.

Come to the next HANC meeting, Thursday, October 11, at 7 pm the Park Branch Library (1833 Page Street) to learn and to question.